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Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels by conducting surveillance across a hundred thousand alt-Earths. Complicating things are a transdimensional race of intelligent komodos wreaking chaos throughout the worlds. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict.

Archive is here, Journals of Mormeck, and first entry is here.

By the rocking chair in the angels’ library, I found something odd when I returned there today. It had been shoved into a crack in the wall, which was improbable enough: a crack in that seamless, immaculate surface. But, then, it was near a small dried up pool of blood. A slide, like the other slides. But this one I had my avatar pocket and bring back. Something told me I shouldn’t “read” it in the library, or mention it to Gabriel. And so later, I sampled it, letting the liquid suffuse Mormeck mountain, soaking into every cell. It was short and odd and I could not tell if it was meant to be fiction or some secret surveil, akin to that recorded by the luna moths, that had been deposited in the library to disguise it. I could not even tell where it had been written or who had written it, except for some slight indication of the story being told in a bar on an alt-Earth, to a human child. This is what I “read”…

***

Time to get out of the house. But it’s so strange, the weight of this giant green head. It makes me stagger back and forth like a drunkard. Maybe I’ll get used to it eventually. The smell of plastic is intoxicating and I feel a kind of extra-terrestrial clarity coming on, like the mysteries of the universe will soon be solved in some small way. So this is what it’s like to be free, is one thought, although with this giant head on, my arms are pinned and it is so…green out here. Even the birds are green. The garbage collector is green. So are all the…cars. I am glad the buildings accommodate people with giant green heads, but of course that makes sense. Still, sometimes I feel as if I might be doing damage to my forehead due to low-hanging doorways.

Did I mention how I came to possess the giant green head in the first place? I don’t think I did. I wonder if I will.

The weight of this giant alien baby head increased once I entered the local mall, and soon I felt a pressure pulling on my neck, which puzzled me. When I managed to find a mirror, I discovered that a rag-tag band of green children had attached themselves to my giant head by means of crude homemade grappling hooks, and were by their combined mass throwing off my balance! I had no choice but to take drastic action…

The drastic action took the form of a sit-down. I sat down and cursed at a rapid rate in a variety of local languages. After half an hour, the children began to find me less than interesting, and left. I was about to continue my perambulations without further interference.

No. I didn’t really sit down and curse. I rose in a rage and flung children like ragdolls. The ones who held on to their grappling hooks. Which is always a fool’s chance.

Did I tell you it was a mall? It wasn’t a mall. I only said that so you wouldn’t feel uncomfortable. And they weren’t children.

But that’s not true, either. I don’t tell you this so you won’t feel uncomfortable. I’m entirely more selfish than that, and I’m not even really talking for your benefit anyway. I say anything I say so I will feel more comfortable…

The rest of my journey in the giant head went badly. I walked to the river, lost my balance, and fell into the water, head-first. I bobbed downstream, legs in the air, staring at upside-down bass and tadpoles, with just enough air to breathe. A strange murky beauty to it all, and from that perspective the river weeds draped down, the alligators all pale belly, long throat, and legs weirdly paddling above their torsos…

So then I managed to get caught in some branches just as the giant green head I was wearing filled up with water. And wedged thusly, I was able to get right-side up. By then, I was miles from town and sopping wet. With difficulty I made it up the steep bank, only to be confronted by a startling and horrible sight….

But, in fact, I may need to back up and tell the truth again. There were other people involved. There always are, even if you don’t know that yet. I left the house in such a hurry for a reason. Someone was after me. Someone caught up. I had no choice but to jump in the river. The head began to fill with water for a reason, too. The bullet.

The ones who pursued me smelled funny. Not bad, just different, like lime mixed with pumice and salt. When they got angry, they smelled like thick brine. They did not always hold their shape like most people. They appeared in the sky above my house diving down with silver wings folded. Their wings were burning, ravaged. Like a damselfly’s wings, theirs were filigreed, and the flame tore holes. By the time they reached the ground, their wings were gone. If not for that, I would never have been able to escape me…although there is always some possibility that they wanted me to escape them.

Here’s another thing I have not said: I was expecting them. Just not so soon. Does that sound strange? It’s not nearly the strangest thing.

—

The startling and horrible sight? Well, part of it was benign: a two-story rotting shack that looked like it had once been part of a farm. But standing outside the door to this ramshackle building, I could see what looked like a huge brown bear with matted flanks standing on its hind-legs. Or an approximation of a bear. It had been dead for a long time, its sides caved in along with the right side of its head…but still it breathed. It had eyes that, even through the green wall between us, looked human. Trapped in a staved-in bear skull.

I could tell it breathed because its ribs pushed slowly through its fur and dead leaves swirled up and out, and then, with the inhale, fell back inside, only to appear again before being lost once more.

For a moment, I hesitated. Wouldn’t anyone? But from behind me, down the riverbank, I heard the unmistakable sounds of pursuit. Even without wings, they were fast. As I’ve said, they did not need to hold their shape. I approached the bear-thing, the dry sedge weeds of the field sandpaper-rough against my trousers. Up close, its eyes were green-flecked gold. Its muzzle revealed hints of yellowing bone. Its paws looked soft, its claws curling in on themselves. Despite the crown of buzzing flies it wore, the bear smelled like a body after the flesh has been worn away by weather and erosion and scavengers: clean, but with some lingering hint of sharpness that bit into the nostrils. If not for the intensity of the eyes, the bear-thing would itself have resembled a tall hut with the thatch falling off the roof beams.

The bear-thing guarded a door.

“I’m not from this place,” I shouted through the huge green head that trapped me. “I need safe passage.”

There came a sound like grass sprinkled into a brisk wind and two huge paws clamped onto either side of my head and, as I braced myself, pulled it off.

The bear-thing tossed the head to the side. I stood there blinking in the sudden glare. Sodden. Read head bleeding. Hair wet with river water and sweat. Arms chaffed raw. Shoulder sore.

“I am not from this place, either,” the bear-thing said. A thin, drawn-out growl like a rusty gate being pulled open.

Behind us, they came closer, with their mouths that could see and their eyes that could hear. Together, we entered the two-story hut and closed the door behind us. Inside, it was wider than on the outside: a vast, tumbling, dark space that I did not wish to explore. I felt as if a step in the wrong direction and I would be falling off of a cliff into nothingness.

“My name is Seether,” said the bear that was not a bear, the corpse that was not a corpse.

A Seether is something ancient from the future. It is a remnant of a kind. Not exactly mortal but not exactly immortal. You can summon one, but you must know what you are summoning. Not all Seethers are sane. Not all Seethers can be controlled. The Seether I entered the building with wasn’t controllable, although I had not summoned him.

That is how I died, that time. After I offered my throat, Seether tore it out with one slow slap of his pay. But dying did not much inconvenience me, other than the pain, which I was able to block out. It was the only way to escape my pursuer.

…But you may be confused now, which is okay. It’s okay to be confused. The world is a far stranger place than you can possibly imagine, and as I mentioned I’m not really talking to you.

—

There may be questions. Here are answers.

Were the pursuers angels? No, as I’ve said, they were not really angels just because they had wings. Do you know why? Because there are no such things as angels, not the way your culture understands angels.

Was I the only one wearing a giant green alien head in this place? No.
Had I done something bad to warrant being chased? Yes.

Had the bullet hurt me badly? Yes. It had. I was already slowly dying as I entered the building with Seether because they had used komodo poison on the bullet.

Why is komodo poison the worst? What you don’t know about the transdimensional properties of the komodo dragon can kill you in more than one place. They can scent your wound through time, through space, sporling out before them like a mist that curls and beckons. While you, you’re more like a rabbit with a pocket watch who’s been stuffed with sawdust, and its falling out of you in chunks, and you’re feeling more and more like part of the background, the scenery. Everything’s receding. Except the komodo. The komodo’s getting closer and closer. Reeling you in through its sixth, its seventh senses. That tongue, forking out. The bandy-legged progression over rough terrain. The smell of rotting flesh that you can’t quite tell. Is it you, or the komodo? Is it your life on his breath? Is this the last thing you’ll ever see? That ugly pitted bullethead. That shit-eating grin? Because the thing is, you have to die to escape a komodo. You have to let your wound take you. Are you up for that? I didn’t know if I was, on top of being devoured by Seether. But what choice did I have, and it must have worked, at least for a little while, because here I am in this backwater talking to you in a language you probably can’t understand. But that’s okay. I’m not really talking to you.

—

Did I mention how I came to possess the giant green head in the first place? I don’t think so, for a number of reasons.

I’m afraid the story is not a pleasant one. I had killed its previous owner, to whom it had, indeed, served as a head of sorts. I had then emptied it and cured it, that I might use it to walk unobserved through the city’s streets and courtyards. That might sound blood-curdling, I know, except it wasn’t. Nothing botched can be truly blood-curdling. This particular type of creature is insensate about the head. The relationship between head and nervous system is looser than, say, that between the shell and body of a horseshoe crab but not as loose as the relationship between a hermit crab and its shell. I had successfully removed the head without death setting in, but then shock took over and I couldn’t save him. And, it’s pretty much the same everywhere: a killing that occurs in the middle of a crime (say, a robbery or a kidnapping) is more or less murder, even if it’s accidental or for a good cause. Sad, yes. Blood-curdling, no.

It strikes me that I also may have been vague as to just where my tale takes place. It takes place on a distant planet in a totally different part of the galaxy, in an area that used to be where the not-angels placed most of their time and resources. The “creature” I killed would be what you call an alien, an extra-terrestrial, just as you would be the same to him. He was one of the most famous composers of his time, in that reality. And I just happened to need his head, so I took it. The greater good demanded it, and even with that disguise I almost didn’t make it to Seether to be devoured and sent out randomly across the worlds to this place, still slowly dying from the komodo poison.

—

The strangest thing? Or maybe it is not so strange. Once, I had been one of them. I had been one of my pursuers, the almost-but-not angels. I might tell you the story if I live long enough. It involves doors. Many doors. It involves a kidnapping. It involves a dislocation so severe it still gives me vertigo. Much worse than wearing a giant green head. It involves my betrayal of them and their plans and their monumental and all-consuming anger over that one simple fact: that I could betray them, that I could want them all dead and everything they stood for removed from the worlds forever.

***

…And there the account ended, far short of satisfactory to Mormeck Mountain, or most others, I would imagine. I felt as if I had eavesdropped in the middle of a conversation that I only understood part of, even if I understood more than I would have a month ago. Not that this bothered me as much as it could have, because the nature of my function for Gabriel has always included snippets of context and never the full picture. I have been sampling lives from afar and then trying to fill in the gaps best I can.

So I have added the slide to my secret nest of papers and other evidence taken from the laboratory and tried to ignore the ghost frogs shadowing me as I removed any signs of having been there.

But as I return now to my surveillance of Marty, one fact makes all the difference.

Somewhere out there lived, or once had lived, a rebel angel…